Louisiana police shoot Alabama fugitive

SULPHUR, La. — An Alabama fugitive stole a truck in Texas and a shotgun in Louisiana before leading a small city’s police department on a wild chase that lasted for hours, their chief said.

Along the way, the suspect broke into houses; threatened women, children and the elderly; tried to carjack vehicles on an interstate highway; drove across a soccer field; forced schools to go on lockdown; and left a trail of wrecked vehicles and other damage, authorities said.

When he was finally cornered, Cody Glenn Light, 35, of Arab, Ala., raised the stolen gun toward an approaching officer, who shot him in the neck, Sulphur Police Chief Lewis Coats said.

Light was hospitalized in stable condition Friday, and no one else was hurt.

In addition to the original charge of attempted murder in Alabama, Light now faces charges including robbery, assault, home invasion, car theft and property damage.

Coats said the first call Wednesday was about a shotgun being stolen from a business by a thief driving a black pickup. That truck matched the description of one stolen Tuesday from a job site near Vidor, Texas, just across the state line, the chief said at a news conference Thursday.

The truck — its tags switched with Alabama tags — was found Wednesday in a canal, after several more calls about a suspicious person.

A woman had reported that a white man in a black pickup had pulled into her driveway and made sexual remarks. Another caller reported a shotgun-toting bicycle rider. Three minutes later, police were told that a man with a shotgun had entered woods near a school.

Two schools and a library were put on lockdown, and officers saturated the area but couldn’t find the man, Coats said.

Hours later, he said, an elderly couple reported that a man had broken into their house, but they pulled guns on him and refused to give him their car keys. He stole some of their prescription medicine and managed to ride off on an ATV, they said.

He next broke into another house, where he took a woman’s keys and drove off in her vehicle, the chief said.

That car crashed as well, and Light was on the run again, briefly eluding police. But then, more calls came in about a gunman on Interstate 10 trying to intimidate drivers into stopping so he could steal a car, Coats said.

Next, he stole a vehicle parked at a trash company and drove through yards, and across fields and a trailer park before crashing that one as well, Coats said. It was then that a Sulphur police officer caught up with him, the chief said.